I’ve been a D&D Player for a long time, but have been without a campaign now for a few years. I’ve spoken to some friends, and there seems to be some building interest in starting an online campaign on such a website like Roll20.

I started looking into options for building maps, outside of just using the Roll20 editor itself, and discovered a program called Tiled, which was exactly what I was looking for. It didn’t take me long after downloading it, to fall in love.

The UBPorts community continues pushing Unity 8 for their mobile/convergence vision in the absence of Canonical as well as making other improvements. Besides offering Unity 8 to Ubuntu users, they are also working on Debian support.

In today's latest Ubuntu Touch Q&A, there is a small reference near the end that they are working on the Unity 8 desktop environment as an option for Debian too. "Yes... But shhh this is a secret..."

At this year's FOSDEM in Brussels, Jan Tobias Mühlberg gave a talk on the latest work on Sancus, a project that was originally presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in 2013. The project is a fully open-source hardware platform to support "trusted computing" and other security functionality. It is designed to be used for internet of things (IoT) devices, automotive applications, critical infrastructure, and other embedded devices where trusted code is expected to be run.

A common security practice for some time now has been to sign executables to ensure that only the expected code is running on a system and to prevent software that is not trusted from being loaded and executed. Sancus is an architecture for trusted embedded computing that enables local and remote attestation of signed software, safe and secure storage of secrets such as encryption keys and certificates, and isolation of memory regions between software modules. In addition to the technical specification [PDF], the project also has a working implementation of code and hardware consisting of compiler modifications, additions to the hardware description language for a microcontroller to add functionality to the processor, a simulator, header files, and assorted tools to tie everything together.

Many people are already familiar with code signing; by default, smartphones won't install apps that haven't been approved by the vendor (i.e. Apple or Google) because each app must be submitted for approval and then signed using a key that is shipped pre-installed on every phone. Similarly, many computers support mechanisms like ARM TrustZone or UEFI Secure Boot that are designed to prevent hardware rootkits at the bootloader level. In practice, some of those technologies have been used to restrict computers to boot only Microsoft Windows or Google Chrome OS, though there are ways to disable the enforcement for most hardware.

Longer upgrade cycles and an increasing number of consumers opting to buy used models poses a threat to future sales of flagship smartphones, argue industry commentators.

Back in 2014, the average upgrade cycle was 23 months – likely attributable to most consumers upgrading every two years, while a much smaller number upgraded every year. But that number has already hit 31 months, says BayStreet Research, and is set to climb higher still …

I have a AMD grahpics card and use the great Open Source driver which comes with my Linux distribution. However for image processing I want the OpenCL support of my graphics card. Currently that’s only provided by the amdgpu-pro driver.

It had been a half-year since the release of the last AMDGPU DDX release, xf86-video-amdgpu 1.4.0, but today that has been succeeded by xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0 as they also embark on a year-based versioning scheme.

xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0.0 was released today as they move to a year-based versioning scheme with X.Org/DDX driver releases becoming less frequent thanks to the maturing xf86-video-modesetting generic driver and also more users moving to Wayland-based Linux desktops.

Similar to Microsoft’s attempts, it’s clear Google believes supporting Linux will ensure developers spend as much time on their respective platforms as possible. While it may seem counterintuitive, it means developers are more likely to make native apps for the platform they’re using in their spare time.

When Kubernetes was first announced in 2014, reactions were mixed. Some pointed to its pedigree and that of its creators, Brendan Burns, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, as reason enough to pay attention. Others focused on the fact that it was derived from Google’s Borg software but was not itself Borg, dismissing it as “Borg-lite” or little more than an interesting science project. Both camps were forced to acknowledge, however, that it was entering a crowded and fragmented software market. It was one project among a rapidly expanding array of options.

In this first quarter of 2018, however, Kubernetes is arguably the most visible of core infrastructure projects. Kubernetes has gone from curiosity to mainstream acceptance, crossing any number of chasms in the process. The project has been successful enough that even companies and projects that have competing container implementation strategies have been compelled to adopt it.

As leading-edge rolling distributions go, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is relatively stable, but it is still true that some snapshots are better than others. Jimmy Berry has announced the creation of a web site tracking the quality of each day's snapshot.

We are seeking input from Internet of Things (#IoT) developers to better understand their needs for software and related tools. Whether you’re a hacker instrumenting your home with Raspberry Pi, or an IT developer working on Industrial IoT solutions, we want to know how you’re using open source technologies to build your IoT solution. The output from this survey will help the open source community focus on the resources most needed by IoT developers.

The VIA Smart Recognition Platform is a facial and object recognition board that runs Android 7.1.1 or Linux on a Snapdragon 820 by way of VIA’s SOM-9X20 module.

VIA Technologies has re-spun its Snapdragon 820 based SOM-9X20 module and SOM-DB2 evaluation board as a VIA Smart Recognition Platform. The boards appear to be the same except that the SOM-9X20 is pre-loaded with a facial and object recognition stack.

This week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Embedded World in Nuremberg are primarily designed to showcase smartphones and embedded systems, respectively. Yet, increasingly the shows are focused on the processors that drive them.

The only major chip announced in conjunction with this week’s conferences was Intel’s Stratix 10 TX FPGA, which is also the only chip covered here that doesn’t run Linux. Several other processors were announced earlier in the month, including AMD’s Ryzen Embedded V1000 and Epyc Embedded 3000. Meanwhile, new details were leaked about Intel’s 10nm Cannon Lake and Ice Lake chips, as well as some new 8th-Gen “Coffee Lake” models.

There are a number of ways to run a desktop Linux environment on a smartphone, but usually it involves installing third-party software. Samsung is one of the first major phone makers that plans to offer official software that lets you use the company’s Android phones as Linux desktop PCs.

Purism announced yesterday that it has added "tamper-evident features" to its laptops, making it the "most secure laptop under customer control". The laptops are integrated with Trammel Hudson’s Heads security firmware, giving users full control of the boot process.

Choosing your first issue to work on depends on the motivation for your contribution as well as your level of technical comfort. You may choose to fix an existing issue or file a new one.

Choosing a contribution may happen organically as part of using Kubernetes. Let's say you notice a bug and you would like to fix it, or you think of a feature that would be nice to have and you would like to add it. You are familiar enough with the languages and tools that this would not be too difficult for you.

Last year Intel open-source developers squared away priority GPU scheduling support within their kernel DRM driver and from Mesa are exposing support for "high priority" GPU processes via the EGL_IMG_context_priority extension. There hasn't been any major real-world user of this support yet, but a patch would allow Wayland's Weston OpenGL renderer to make use of it.

Chris Wilson of Intel who was also involved in the driver's GPU priority scheduling support has now added support to libweston's OpenGL renderer code to make use of EGL_IMG_context_priority when available.

A prolific contributor to Mozilla's GFX-RS project, the Rust programming language, and also an author to a Rust-based SPIR-V shader compiler is now working on a C++-based Vulkan-over-D3D12 implementation.

Many ioquake3-powered games like OpenArena, Smokin' Guns, World of Padman, and others have faded away or at least not put out a new release in a number of years, but I was surprised this morning waking up to a new Urban Terror release.

There is the Urban Terror Resurgence (formerly Urban Terror HD) still being worked on as a modern remake of the game with Unreal Engine 4. But as that's not out yet and those wanting to relive an ioquake3-powered first person shooter, Urban Terror 4.3.3 is now available.

You can now search for firmware and hardware vendors — but the algorithm is still very much WIP and we need some real searches from real users. If you have a spare 10 seconds, please search for your hardware on the LVFS. I’ll be fixing up the algorithm as we find problems. I’ll also be using the search data to work out what other vendors we need to reach out to. Comments welcome.

First Distribution, South Africa's leading distributor for data centre, enterprise and cloud solutions, today announced that it has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme, offering customers and independent software vendors greater confidence from a partner ecosystem when building their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions.

A decade passes so quickly. And yet, ten years for open source is half its life. How have things changed in those ten years? So much has happened in this fast-moving and exciting world, it's hard to remember. But we're in luck. The continuing availability of Linux Journal's past issues and website means we have a kind of time capsule that shows us how things were, and how we saw them.

Ten years ago, I was writing a regular column for Linux Journal, much like this one. Looking through the 80 or so posts from that time reveals a world very different from the one we inhabit today. The biggest change from then to now can be summed up in a word: Microsoft. A decade back, Microsoft towered over the world of computing like no other company. More important, it (rightly) saw open source as a threat and took continuing, wide-ranging action to weaken it in every way it could.

Its general strategy was to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). At every turn, it sought to question the capability and viability of open source. It even tried to convince the world that we no longer needed to talk about free software and open source—anyone remember "mixed source"?

Alongside general mud-flinging, Microsoft's weapon of choice to undermine and thwart open source was a claim of massive patent infringement across the entire ecosystem. The company asserted that the Linux kernel violated 42 of its patents; free software graphical interfaces another 65; the OpenOffice.org suite of programs, 45; and assorted other free software 83 more. The strategy was two-fold: first to squeeze licensing fees from companies that were using open source, and second, perhaps even more important, to paint open source as little more than a pale imitation of Microsoft's original and brilliant ideas.

While the average Chromebook user tends to stick with Chrome OS, Chromebooks are really just lightweight Linux machines capable of a lot more. For years, crafty Chromebook owners have been using Crouton (Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment) to run Ubuntu, Debian, and Kali Linux systems within Chrome OS. When set up properly with an extension called Xiwi, you can use a keyboard shortcut to switch between Chrome OS and a standard Linux desktop environment. It’s a hack, but it looks a future version of Chrome OS will add native support for Linux applications via containers.

The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.

With Linux being at the core of Chrome OS, it perhaps seems surprising that there's no easy way to run Linux distros or applications on Chromebooks. Yes, there's a Crouton script that can help you to achieve this, but it's far from ideal as it massively lowers system security. All this could be about to change, however.

Google could be set to make its Chrome OS a much more potent threat to Microsoft if a new commit in the Chromium source is any guide. A developer project known as Crostini shows signs of Google officially introducing support for Linux virtual machines on Chrome OS.

Ribbon Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: RBBN), a global leader in secure and intelligent cloud communications, today announced that it has joined The Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation Networking Fund (LFN) as a Silver Member. The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history.

As of now we have moved all unsupported releases (EL-5, Fedora 8 – 25) to our archive (http://archive.rpmfusion.org/) and clients are now being redirected to the new archive system. The archive consists of 260GB which means we can reduce the size mirrors need to carry by more than 75%.

The last few days have seen a somehow quite unusual frenzy of uploads to Debian from my side. Mostly due to the fact that while doing my tax declaration (btw, a huge pain here in Japan) I needed some spare time and dedicated them to long overdue package maintenance work as well as some new request.

noun: small pieces of toasted or fried bread served with a topping as an appetizer or canapé.

In layman’s terms, a crostini is a fancy crouton. More often than not, you will find crostini served in a similar manner to Bruschetta; brushed with Olive Oil and topped with cheese and other various deliciousness.

It could soon be possible to run Linux apps on a Chromebook without jumping through hoops. Recent commits to the Chrome OS source code suggests that Google is preparing to introduce support for virtual machines, specifically Linux containers.

The Sun4i DRM driver work has been progressing a lot since its mainline introduction two years ago with Linux 4.7. With the Linux 4.17 cycle, the A83T SoC will have initial HDMI output support.

If you happen to have a tablet or other device powered by the Allwinner A83T, it should finally have working HDMI out support when using the Sun4i DRM driver with the kernel update coming later this year.

When i bought my new desktop at home, i already had a plan to reinstall my old desktop with Slackware64, but i didn't specify the timeframe or even the version i'm going to install with. The old one was 32 bit since i got it installed since 2009 and it has been working well so far, but it's getting slower for my needs where i got to use virtual machines to build packages for MATE and Cinnamon. It is a dual-core E5300 Intel CPU with 4 GB of RAM, 320 GB + 1 TB hard drive, and NVidia GeForce 7050.

gvSIG Desktop 2.4, the new version of the open source Geographic Information System, is now available. You can access both the gvSIG Desktop 2.4 installable and portable versions from the download section of the project website [1], with distributions available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

LLVM 6 is running a few days behind scheduled for its release along with Clang 6 for the C/C++ compiler, but this latest big update to this open-source compiler stack should still be on the ways in the days ahead.

The US began its transition to chip-based credit cards in earnest in October 2015, after high-profile credit card hacks in the previous years at Target, Home Depot, Michaels, and other big-box retailers. Today, although only 59 percent of US storefronts have terminals that accept chip cards, fraud has dropped 70 percent from September 2015 to December 2017 for those retailers that have completed the chip upgrade, according to Visa.

On the Linux Desktop, there are quite a few choices for email applications. Each of these has their own pros and cons which should be weighed depending on one’s needs. Some clients will have MS Exchange support. Others do not. In general, because email is reasonably close to free (and yes, we can thank Hotmail for that) it has been a difficult place to make money. Without a cash flow to encourage developers, development has trickled at best.

China’s smartphone market has seen intense competition over the past few years with four local brands capturing more than 60 percent of sales in 2017.

Huawei Technologies, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi Technology recorded strong shipment growth on a year-on-year basis. But some market experts warned that Oppo and Vivo may see the growth of their shipments slow this year as users become more discriminating.

The new Emergency SOS feature released by Apple for the iPhone is the one to blame for no less than 1,600 false calls to 911 since October, according to dispatchers.

And surprisingly, emergency teams in Elk Grove and Sacramento County in California say they receive at least 20 such 911 calls every day from what appears to be an Apple service center.

While it’s not exactly clear why the iPhones that are probably brought in for repairs end up dialing 911, dispatchers told CBS that the false calls were first noticed in the fall of the last year. Apple launched new iPhones in September 2017 and they went on sale later the same month and in November, but it’s not clear if these new devices are in any way related to the increasing number of accidental calls to 911.

The thin line that exists between entertainment industry DRM software and plain malware has been pointed out both recently and in the past. There are many layers to this onion, ranging from Sony's rootkit fiasco, to performance hits on machines thanks to DRM installed by video games, up to and including the insane idea that copyright holders ought to be able to use malware payloads to "hack back" against accused infringers.

What is different in more recent times is the public awareness regarding DRM, computer security, and an overall fear of malware. This is a natural kind of progression, as the public becomes more connected and reliant on computer systems and the internet, they likewise become more concerned about those systems. That may likely explain the swift public backlash to a small game-modding studio seemingly installing something akin to malware in every installation of its software, whether from a legitimate purchase or piracy.

In this video from the Stanford HPC Conference, Christian Kniep from Docker Inc. presents: State of Containers.

“This talk will recap the history of and what constitutes Linux Containers, before laying out how the technology is employed by various engines and what problems these engines have to solve. Afterward, Christian will elaborate on why the advent of standards for images and runtimes moved the discussion from building and distributing containers to orchestrating containerized applications at scale. In conclusion, attendees will get an update on what problems still hinder the adoption of containers for distributed high performance workloads and how Docker is addressing these issues.”

For the past seven years, Open Networking Summit (ONS) has brought together the networking industry’s ecosystem of network operators, vendors, open source projects, leading researchers, and investors to discuss the latest SDN and NFV developments that will shape the future of the networking industry. With this year’s event, taking place March 26-29, 2018 in Los Angeles, ONS will evolve its approach as the premier open source networking event. We’re excited to share three new aspects of this year’s ONS that you won’t want to miss:

The Linux Foundation recently announced a new project, dubbed Akraino, to develop an open source software stack capable of supporting high-availability cloud services for edge computing systems and applications. To kick off the project, AT&T will contribute code made for carrier-scale edge computing applications running in virtual machines and containers.

The Linux Foundation has been particularly busy in 2018 thus far consolidating its existing networking project under a single umbrella, known as LF Networking. That umbrella might need to get a bit larger, as on Feb. 20 the Linux Foundation announced the new Akraino project, with code coming initially from AT&T.

FreeOffice 2016 is the latest version of the Office software from SoftMaker. In fact, you wouldn’t be wrong if you called it the free version of SoftMaker Office 2018 seeing as it features the same suite of applications.

Stellaris: Apocalypse [Steam], the latest expansion for the grand space strategy game from Paradox Development Studio is out. The big 2.0 'Cherryh' patch is also now available.

Paradox has also announced today, that Stellaris has officially passed 1.5 million copies sold making it one of their most popular games ever made. I'm not surprised by this, as I consider Stellaris their most accessible game.

I recently got a new work laptop, a 13” Yoga 720. It proved difficult to install Debian on; pressing F12 would get a boot menu allowing me to select a USB stick I have EFI GRUB on, but after GRUB loaded the kernel and the initrd it would just sit there never outputting anything else that indicated the kernel was even starting. I found instructions about Ubuntu 17.10 which helped but weren’t the complete picture. What seems to be the situation is that the kernel won’t happily boot if “Legacy Support” is not enabled - enabling this (and still booting as EFI) results in a happier experience.

I just did a Debian install on a Dell PowerEdge T30 for a client. The Dell web site is a bit broken at the moment, it didn’t list the price of that server or give useful specs when I was ordering it. I was under the impression that the server was limited to 8G of RAM, that’s unusually small but it wouldn’t be the first time a vendor crippled a low end model to drive sales of more expensive systems. It turned out that the T30 model I got has 4*DDR4 sockets with only one used for an 8G DIMM. It apparently can handle up to 64G of RAM.

Emtrion’s Linux-ready “SBC-RZN1D” SBC, which will soon power a “Flex2COM” controller, features a Renesas dual-core -A7 RZ/N1D SoC and 4x LAN ports, and is designed for multi-protocol fieldbus communications.

Emtrion, which recently announced its emCON-RZ/G1H module based on an octa-core Renesas RZ/G1H SoC, has unveiled a Renesas based, quad-LAN port SBC-RZN1D SBC focused on industrial communication. The SBC-RZN1D taps the Renesas RZ/N1D (R9006G032), one of a new line of RZ/N1D SoCs launched last year by Renesas for industrial multi-protocol communications. Renesas recently collaborated with Avnet to ship its own dual-Ethernet Renesas RZ/N1D Solution Kit (see farther below).

There was a time when big operating systems ran on big iron. IBM, Data General, Burroughs, DEC, and other computer makers built big machines with big, blinking lights, and big price tags. They ran grown-up software and they supported multiuser operating systems. If you wanted a toy, you built a microcomputer. If you wanted a real machine for serious work, you bought a mainframe. Maybe a minicomputer, if it were for lesser tasks.

Android is the most used operating system on the planet. In fact, it’s almost omnipresent in the mobile ecosystem. Even the Android versions, like Nougat, Marshmallow, Lollipop, etc. have been able to build their individual fan following.

AWS customers that are running SAP workloads on Suse Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications -- a leading platform for SAP Hana and SAP S/4Hana -- will get integrated and streamlined support from AWS and Suse under the agreement.

AWS customers will be able to buy the Suse Linux Enterprise on demand, so they will pay only for what they use.

"This isn't an evolution, but a further support statement that showcases how this new relationship better enables AWS and Suse to deliver SAP solutions on AWS," said Tom Hammond-Doel, AWS global alliance director.

Besides x86_64, we have seen Spectre mitigation work happen recently for ARM, POWER, and IBM s390, but no prominent MIPS activity to report until now.

The Spectre Variant Two vulnerability affects P5600 and P6600 chips while as part of their mitigation strategy is a new LLVM patch that was just merged and introduces a -mindirect-jump=hazard switch. This is different from the Variant Two mitigation technique on x86 of Retpolines.

In 2015, Google released Kubernetes as an open source project. It was an implementation of Google's internal system called Borg. Google and the Linux Foundation created the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to host Kubernetes (and other cloud-native projects) as an independent project governed by a community around it. Kubernetes quickly became one of the fastest growing open source projects in history, growing to thousands of contributors across dozens of companies and organizations.

What makes Kubernetes so incredible is its implementation of Google's own experience with Borg. Nothing beats the scale of Google. Borg launches more than 2-billion containers per week, an average of 3,300 per second. At its peak, it's many, many more. Kubernetes was born in a cauldron of fire, battle-tested and ready for massive workloads.

Akraino will offer users new levels of flexibility to scale edge cloud services quickly, to maximize the applications or subscribers supported on each server, and to help ensure the reliability of systems that must be up at all times. While several open source projects exist to help solve pieces of the puzzle, nothing currently meets the need for an edge infrastructure solution. Integration of existing efforts in this new project will help deliver ease of use, hardened reliability, unique features, and performance for carrier, provider, and IoT networks.

LG releases webOS Open Source Edition, looks to expand webOS usage

LG’s smart TVs ship with an operating system called webOS, which is the latest version of an operating system that was developed by Palm to run on phones, acquired by HP to use with tablets, and eventually sold to LG, which is still using it today.
But now LG wants to expand the adoption of webOS and the company is working with the South Korean government to solicit business proposals from other companies interested in using webOS.
LG has also released a webOS Open Source Edition version of the operating system.

Test driving 4 open source music players and more

In my last article, I described my latest music problem: I need an additional stage of amplification to make proper use of my new phono cartridge. While my pre-amplifier contains a phono stage, its gain is only suitable for cartridges that output about 5mV, whereas my new cartridge has a nominal output of 0.4mV.
Based on my investigation, I liked the looks of the Muffsy phono kits, so I ordered the head amplifier, the power supply, and the back panel. I also needed to obtain a case to hold the boards and the back panel, available online from many vendors. Muffsy does not sell the “wall wart” necessary to power the unit, so I ordered one of those from a supplier in California. Finally, inspecting my soldering iron, solder “sucker,” and solder, I’ve realized I need to do better—so a bit more shopping, online or local, is in order there. Finally, for those, like me, whose soldering skills may be rusty and perhaps were not all that great to begin with, Muffsy kindly offers links to two instructional videos.